Welcome to the April Development Update!

This month we released the first PTB for Update 17, adding new management mechanics, updated water rendering and two species of Stegosaurus for you to discover. Though it’s yet to contain combat, we’ve had really good feedback so far! Players on Steam can switch over at anytime, so be sure to read the patch notes for all the details.

Combat has continued to see a lot of development throughout April, with animals now taking damage and even dying if they take too many hits. We’ve developed custom tooling that allows us to attach “hurt boxes” to animals while attacking, meaning that any lunge, hit or bite must be close enough to actually damage an opponent. Next month, we’re aiming to expand attack variety, support “sweeping” attack damage (e.g. tail swipes) and begin to start polishing things up as we mass-produce combat animations for all the animals.

Our custom editor for adding damage and interaction events.

In the meantime, we’ve also kept chipping away at future content for 1.0! We started AND finished building an exciting feature that we know you’ll love, made a bunch of new foliage assets and began laying the technical groundwork for scenarios. We’re especially excited for the story missions so that new players will have a dedicated onboarding experience.

For the park builders out there, you’ll be pleased to know that a new batch of stylized animal signs are on the way! In U17, 10+ cutouts will be able to decorate your walls, including our lovely Stegosaurus and some vivarium species.

At long last, the king of the Jurassic arrives in Update 17! Coming with four different alternate species, we’re proud to finally unveil the first two models for Allosaurus fragilis and jimmadseni.

For each species of Allosaurus coming to the game, we’ve tried to give them unique skulls and bodies inspired by their fossilised counterparts. For example, fragilis is much more robust compared to the sloped snout of jimmadseni. 

Being a large but slender theropod, there’s a lot of character we’re excited to put into its animations! We’re definitely trying to make this dinosaur feel particularly conniving as it stalks around its habitat.

As you can imagine, our animation team have had their hands full building out the combat library for our various rigs. With our combat system, we’re working to add a number of unique capabilities depending on the animal such as kicking or slashing if something gets too close. You can see some of this variety below on these tests for Brachiosaurus, mammoth and Dilophosaurus.

In terms of AI, a large part of this month’s development was spent on encounters and circling behaviors, ensuring that animals target the flank of their opponent and can defensively position themselves. This is best demonstrated by something like Stegosaurus which will actively turn its body and tail towards threats during battle.

While the T. rex is still our main combatant for testing, we’ve prepared a couple of short clips to show you a brief glimpse at where things currently are. We’ll remind you again that this is all still very work-in-progress so there’s plenty of improvement to come, especially by the next Dev Diary.

As we’ve said plenty of times, this is a dynamic system at its core. Even in the final product there will still be clipping or imperfect alignments and that’s just the reality of choosing this path. However, we believe the variability that comes from dynamism makes it all worth it. Even in terms of development, working on combat has put pressure on other areas and allowed us to patch holes in the locomotion system that made animals more sluggish than intended. It’s really hard to convey in such a short video just how much work has needed to go into combat thus far, but it’s quite fun to watch things play out when it’s not always a choreographed fight.

Speaking of, a cool thing we’re also working on is that when an animal has been knocked over or falls due to low health, predators can come and perform a kill animation, finishing off their prey. Even in its current state, we think it’s a pretty rad detail!

(T. rex is immortal and has increased damage for testing. And no, they won’t always roar after a kill. Sometimes they’ll sniff or do nothing!)

As a little tease of what’s to come, we also have new wetland plants arriving later this year in Update 18! To make the most of U17’s water rendering improvements, we’ll be adding new underwater vegetation like eelgrass and expanding the roster of surface plants with species such as hyacinth.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a biome update without revisions! U18 will add new versions of the bald cypress, mangroves, reeds and cattails to revitalise your existing marshes.

Created by acrogiga2004

Created by ASSASSINSPINO

Created by springrolla

Created by luci257

Created by ItsjustNick
Thank you for reading April's dev diary!
We greatly appreciate all the feedback and excitement that the Update 17 PTB has received so far. All of your screenshots have been mindblowing and are a huge motivator for the team while we continue to chip away at combat. We hope that you’ll continue to look forward to seeing more combat progress in May’s Dev Diary!

- The PK Team

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Welcome, Park Testers!
This PTB release is focused on quickly addressing the most commonly reported community issues - most notably input system bugs and unusable keybind controls. We hope this provides a more stable testing environment while we continue working on the remaining species for U17 and further develop animal combat.

The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library

2. Go to Properties

3. Betas

4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• Stegosaurus is still being implemented so additional sounds and visual polish will arrive later

• There is an occasional water loading issue which can cause old 'muddy' water to load with incorrect visuals. This can easily be fixed by forcing a water update, either through painting more water or replacing the water bodies with a different water type

• Staff can be a bit unwieldy when using the breakrooms; please bear with us while we teach them how to take breaks!

• Music

  • Added a new Vivarium track for Arboreal animals: First Flight (1:36)

• Animals

  • Added Desert biome preference to both Stegosaurus species

• Music

  • Building tracks ‘Build, Sleep, Repeat’ and ‘Ingenuity’ can now play at a park rating of 0

• Critical

  • Fixed several critical input system failures exposed by the initial PTB play-testing:

    • Patched a critical input error that would accidentally register certain keyboards as joystick devices, forcing the game’s input to not listen to the default mouse/keyboard behavior. Please let us know if this issue persists!

    • Fixed multiple input detection inaccuracies that would lead any custom binding’s application from failing with the ‘Invalid Keybinds’ error

    • Fixed an issue causing successful custom settings from being loaded across play sessions

    • Re-enabled camera mouse panning behavior

    • Fixed granular tuning of custom keybinds, with certain mouse-related keybinds now accepting any input types, whereas other keybinds strictly require non-mouse inputs

    • Fixed RMB (right mouse button) triggering GUI cancellation events

    • Fixed multiple keybinding layout issues in the Options Menu

  • Fixed an animal enclosure registering bug which would cause moving un-enclosed animals to deregister from important data

• Animals

  • Fixed a mesh error causing immature Velociraptor to glitch out when far away

  • Fixed incorrect texture resolution settings for both Stegosaurus species

• UI/UX

  • Fixed a silly last-minute oversight that could cause sandbox settings not to be synced up with the new game menu’s user settings upon loading a new game. It is possible that this also caused animals not filling their nutrition through browsing, even if players enabled this option

  • The ‘Not Contained’ and ‘In Quarantine’ headers in the animal management menu list now accurately update their animal counts and species widgets

  • Fixed the Tokod Locality excavation site not appearing on the excavations map

  • Fixed faulty logic for the ‘Animal Escaped’ park issue

  • Fixed an issue causing Loading Bay selection to not trigger when the Logistic Management View was open

• Rendering

  • Fixed an issue where animal textures could be assigned an incorrect mip size during the nursery menu preview, causing the incorrect texture settings to persist for the rest of the session

• Audio

  • Nursery animal preview individuals should not be heard outside of the nursery menu any longer